Across the board–from The Sopranos and Weeds to Bones and the C.S.I. franchise—television is eating the movies’ lunch: Dialogue that’s fast, mordant, and elliptical. Data-rich, layered, complex stories. Now, if TV can keep from taking itself too seriously …

In the 1960s (many of you weren’t around for that decade, but trust me—it was wild), one of the countercultural articles of faith was that you didn’t so much watch a movie as lean back and “let it wash over you.” It was still possible then to believe in the pore-cleansing powers of sensory overload and oceanic bliss, no matter how many Elvis Presley musicals gunked up the drive-ins. The movie screen was sacramental, the wide horizon on which Stanley Kubrick, Michelangelo Antonioni, and David Lean played God. Compared with the puny portal of the television box, the movie screen bespoke a cool blank inscrutable mystique—a billboard-size tabula rasa ready to burst into tapestry. So much expectation hinged on that tingling moment in the theater when the lights dimmed and the curtains parted, revealing the screen staring back at us, virgin with possibility. “Let us pray,” Pauline Kael would sometimes mutter, not in a religious spirit (she was not a religious person) but in the hope that something wonderful was about to unveil, something that would make up for the lousy film the day before.

Today our prayers fly in different directions. We pray for the movie to finally get started after a face-blasting bombardment of ads and previews cranked up at full volume and, later, much later, after we’ve forgotten our reason for existence, pray for the film to finish already. Please, Mommy, make it stop. Pirates of the Caribbean 3 was longer than Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch, a callow affront to all that is holy. And as the film takes forever to burn off its budget, the fidgets in the audience flip their cell phones on to check for messages, gray lights going on and off like little refrigerator doors being opened and shut by obsessive-compulsives, or, worse, take an incoming call and start narrating what’s happening on-screen to the idiot at the other end. For me, the ideal time to go to the movies used to be the dead of the afternoon, when the empty seats outnumbered the lonely wayfarers. Now the ideal time to go to the movies is almost never. With home theaters going big, wide, and hi-def with digital cable, plasma screens, and sound systems, the aesthetic gap between multiplexing and couch-potatoing has never been narrower, but that doesn’t apply to me, since I don’t happen to have a wall-size plasma screen that hypnotizes. It’s content that provides the killer edge, that makes the choice between what’s at the movies and what’s on TV nearly no contest. Strip away the glitter and grandiosity and the truth is that most of what’s on the movie screen runs a ragged second to what’s available on television at a fraction of the aggravation.

TV promises so much less, yet gives so much more.

TV series toil under tighter budgets and shooting schedules than mainstream movies, but the baseline level of competence and coherence is consistently higher, especially since Jerry Bruckheimer got into the game and upped the ante on slick propulsion. If the cinematography of Zodiac and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford exemplifies the high end of lavish, meticulous mood painting, the drop-off is steep from there, represented by insults to sensitive eyes such as the burlap-sack crapitude of many of the Judd Apatow and Will Ferrell comedies, and the overlit, dermatological-exam crassness of rom-coms such as What Happens in Vegas (whose “ugliness and ineptitude” provoked New York Times movie critic Manohla Dargis to object, “Ms. Diaz is particularly ill served by the material and the production; she’s harshly, at times brutally, lighted and often unflatteringly costumed”—this never would have happened to Norma Shearer at MGM!). Striving for a wow effect intended to leave audiences wasted yet wanting more (“more” meaning a sequel), Hollywood productions often overcompensate by throwing everything they have into the film’s third act, prolonging it like the last movement of a Mahler symphony. With so much riding on the initial box-office impact—the opening weekend—the average big-budgeter is termite-ridden with second thoughts and built-in safeguards. Such films become the misshapen product of too many hands offering too many “notes,” metastasizing into a ramshackle behemoth as re-write after re-write produces add-ons to the basic structure, the end results being monuments to interference. Even the non-actioners take forever to get to the point (wearing out their welcome until you wonder if John C. Reilly is ever going to pack up and go home), and what is the point?

It’s millionaires telling you that there’s more to life than money. Celebrities telling you that there’s more to life than fame. That for all their quirks and frustrations, there’s no substitute for family, especially around the holidays, when everyone gathers together to knit Uncle Bill a new straitjacket while waiting for the snowflakes to bestow their blessing. That nothing melts a careerist’s selfish heart like having to parent a child who has nowhere else to go—sure, it’s a crimp in your single lifestyle, helping with their homework and wiping away drool, but that’s a small price to pay for learning what it is to care. That a mouthy teenager with attitude knows more about life than placeholder adults who have abandoned their dreams (the Juno effect). That you don’t need superpowers to be a genuine hero, although they help, especially when fending off fighter jets or intergalactoids. That good and evil are two faces of the same flipped coin, kindred spirits embroiled in a terrible co-dependency in which evil gets the best lines, good the last word. That war takes a terrible toll on the joshing innocence of our soldiers in combat and is hell on the nerves, as evidenced by the palsied camerawork. That puking is the highest form of physical comedy, with kicks to the crotch a dandy second. That we are never closer to God than when Morgan Freeman consoles us in a voice-over, never closer to wisdom than when Tommy Lee Jones shares a chawed piece of beef jerky, and never closer to nature than when Matthew McConaughey (“Matthew Mahogany,” as he’s endearingly known) bares his teeth and torso to the salty air.

Despite their supposed deviance from Hollywood formula, indie films are sometimes no better and often worse in their time-released didacticism and midafternoon droop, the characters so depleted by anomie, shrunken-head defeatism, dead-end prospects, deadbeat friends, bed-head hair, and a wardrobe carefully selected from the dirty-clothes hamper that they can barely drag themselves to the diner to watch the new waitress tie on her apron. They’re opportunities for actor buddies to hang out together like an informal meeting of the proletariat. When director Paul Mazursky did his character studies of free-spirited neurotics with frizzy hair, he always made room for rogue elements and dissonant energies, such as Cliff Gorman’s nooky hound in An Unmarried Woman, Jeff Goldblum’s abrasively egotistical actor in Next Stop, Greenwich Village (a rough draft of Dustin Hoffman’s unemployable pain-in-the-ass in Tootsie), Josh Mostel’s c-word kiss-off to Ellen Burstyn in Harry and Tonto. But in neighborhood rambles such as Feast of Love, Lonesome Jim (which I liked—Casey Affleck works wonders with his impacted vowels), Dan in Real Life, and The Jane Austen Book Club, there’s a slumpy sameness to the dialogue delivery and body language, as if everyone were making withdrawals from the same tired blood bank. Few directors apart from the late Robert Altman have the knack of knitting the multiple strands of lonely strays and tipsy dreamers into a floating island of community. Even when frail souls had their butterfly wings wilt in an Altman film, the muffled downfalls didn’t betray a heavy paw of preordainment. There’s a uniform, overdetermined depressiveness to so many indies—noble in intent, conscientious in execution, they tell you tonally from the opening shot or the first scratchy musical note that there’ll be no Shawshank Redemption at the end of this bus ride. My favorite indie of the last few years, Old Joy, a character study of two friends who have grown apart, is so recessive and word-hoarding that it breaks through to a state of grace. But that’s a rarity. Most of these loosely-hung-together slow-metabolism vignettes remain nestled on the naturalistic surface, with mumblecore films caterpillaring into unmade beds.

Television spares us the faint twitchings of twig life. It doesn’t have the luxury of dawdle and dead-man’s-float inertia. Even its slackers maintain an antic pace (see NBC’s My Name Is Earl). A medium with less time to spare and more rigorous, restrictive formats to follow (Fox’s 24 deploys time constriction as a formal suspense device, each episode a race against a doomsday clock), television syncs to the synaptic speed of our minds, our ability to process information and achieve pattern recognition. Series such as 24, the C.S.I. shows, Bones, and Numb3rs lay down an acoustic strip under the alphabet-soup techno-jargon that correlates to a mental hum, as if the shows were thinking along with us (whereas so many movies are thinking for us, bringing the word down from on high). A fusion of nervous energy and nerd expertise, TV dialogue at its best is fast, flippant, mordant, and elliptical, and nicks the inside corner, unafraid of letting loose a little artsy-fartsy sophistication (Don Draper discovering the poetry of Frank O’Hara on Mad Men, a murder investigation pivoting on a Sister Carrie allusion on Law & Order: Criminal Intent).

Epic-contest serials such as Heroes, Lost, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The X-Files, and Battlestar Galactica extend this to the quantum field, shotful of literary, cinematic, historical, mythological, and political references, but cunningly self-reflexive too, requiring not only devotional attention to the action at hand but also a storehouse awareness of lore relating to past episodes to unscramble the flashbacks and flash-forwards, and their significance (if any) to the unfurling saga—the whole Möbius-strip mishegaas. To be a scholar of The Sopranos or The Wire was to ford a thick tomato soup of anger, lust, alpha-malehood, corruption, sadism, treacherous intrigue, and raw power wrestling comparable to a Balzac novel, or backstage at The View. The data density of television infiltrates every genre, except perhaps reality TV, that game preserve for the narcissistic null and void (Denise Richards, the Kardashians, the Hulk Hogan family circus). Even the sitcom, once as clutter-free and linear as the daily comic strip, has become, post-Seinfeld, a complex operating field, from the barrage of visual and verbal absurdism on Scrubs (whose speed and invention make the Mad-magazine gags in the Airplane!/Naked Gun movies look like cave drawings) to the polymorphous vaudeville of Will & Grace (I Love Lucy meets Pedro Almodóvar), to the crackling subtext breaking through the choppy suds of the banal maunderings on The Office (both the U.K. and U.S. versions), to the screwball chemistry of Tina Fey and Alec Baldwin on 30 Rock, each episode a boomerang attack of hilarious throwaway lines and deadpan takes.

Television series can ill afford an intense solar ego around which everything else is side dressing. Networks have learned their lesson from being at the mercy of Roseanne’s ax-like mood swings, of draping too many hopes on even so prodigious a talent as Bette Midler (whose CBS sitcom lasted one dribbly season). TV is less hierarchical than Hollywood, more willing to share. The intimacy of television offers an ideal frame for the sort of teamwork at which Hollywood once excelled, from Nick and Nora in the Thin Man series to the Hope and Crosby “road” pictures to Rock and Doris to Paul Newman and Robert Redford. Them days are gone. It’s difficult to think of more negative chemistry than that created by Colin Farrell and Jamie Foxx as Crockett and Tubbs in the Miami Vice movie, a marriage of sullen dispositions and defiant stubble. Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman in The Bucket List were like two bank statements sharing a bittersweet sunset. The rapport and banter have migrated to television, whose matched sets include Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock on Star Trek, Jerry Orbach and Chris Noth in the classic years of Law & Order, David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson on The X-Files, David Boreanaz and Emily Deschanel on Bones (the dynamic between Boreanaz’s James Garner aplomb and exasperation and Deschanel’s Gene Tierney–ish fine-etched beauty makes for the most interesting evolving relationship on TV), Larry David and Jeff Garlin on Curb Your Enthusiasm, and Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert lobbing it back and forth from their respective Comedy Central fake newsers.

An ensemble in movies becomes an extended family on TV, from the WJM team on The Mary Tyler Moore Show to the gang at Cheers to Friends to the Scoobies on Buffy the Vampire Slayer to The Sopranos to Lost to Heroes to Grey’s Anatomy to Gossip Girl to the C.S.I. franchises to Weeds to Scrubs to the short-lived Robbery Homicide Division to the chain-smokers and martini sippers at Mad Men to the peerless quartets of Seinfeld and Will & Grace (and Jack and Karen), fielding a variety of character types, body shapes, acting techniques, and Botox formations that fire on different cylinders without pinwheeling off into incoherent directions. A solid, organic concept supersedes individual talents, most of the spark plugs capably replaceable. E.R. suffered barely a hiccup after heartthrob George Clooney left; Dick Wolf has rotated actors out of the law-enforcement roles on Law & Order the way George Steinbrenner used to replace Yankee managers (would that make Chris Noth Wolf’s Billy Martin?); Joe Mantegna popped right in to fill the gap left by Mandy Patinkin’s furrowed concern on Criminal Minds; every few years the BBC unveils a new Dr. Who. The Sopranos even managed to survive the irreplaceable loss of Nancy Marchand as Tony’s monster mother after Marchand’s death, in 2000. Casting changes, production shake-ups, fluctuations in the actors’ personal fortunes (and poundage—Matthew Perry’s alarming weight drop on Friends, Vincent D’Onofrio’s hefting up on Law & Order: Criminal Intent), the rise and fall of multiple story arcs, the sheer duration of the time spent with these characters over the course of years—they texturize our involvement with a show until it acquires the layered depth of any long-term commitment. “All these alterations, some great, some small, happen incrementally, over weeks of episodes—the way such things happen in life, and not the way they typically happen in movies, for example, or even in books,” Charles McGrath observed in The New York Times Magazine (October 22, 1995). “To think of a character in recent American fiction who actually evolves this way—who ages and changes before our eyes—you may have to go back to Harry Angstrom, in Updike’s ‘Rabbit’ novels. In so many contemporary books, you get just a few days or weeks in the lives of the characters, or a year or two at most. There isn’t room enough for a whole lot to happen.” Movies are more like one-night stands. Either you get off or you don’t, then it’s on to the next.

While The Dark Knight, Sin City, and similar apocalyptic downers purvey a dank, sunless vision of the metropolis in which nature has been uprooted down to the last blade of grass, permanent midnight in the Disneyland of the damned, TV has gone a different route, crawling into the creepy surrealist everyday lying beneath and behind the front lawns and drawn curtains that David Lynch peeled back in Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks, only to abandon for the hermetic confines of Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire. While Batman and Spider-Man alternate slingshot moves on the dark spires of a digitally enhanced kingdom, television spreads a semblance of suburbia across the screen like a picnic blanket covering a septic hole. Merging the erotic intrigue of John Updike’s fiction with the entropic consumerism of Don DeLillo’s panoptic scans (where the brand names are stuck on like iodine labels), cable series specialize in a rarefied, slapstick existential queasiness, a free-floating sick-inside sensation where the white worms of decay and mortality wriggle beneath the bright, polished surface. In his well-appointed kitchen, Tony Soprano lumbered like a bear in a bathrobe, an evolutionary anomaly, his fainting spells premonitory bell tolls of death. Six Feet Under was an extended madrigal to mortality, a fantasia in a funeral parlor. Coiled behind the earth-toned, hospitality-suite look of Big Love is an extended polygamous family enmeshed in factional strife, the quest for middle-class respectability competing with a culture of patriarchal predation where craggedy old men—they don’t get more rawboned than Harry Dean Stanton (he’s like Bob Dylan’s older, debauched brother)—squint their rheumy eyes as they select their next pie-faced child bride. And these are just the HBO shows.

In AMC’s disturbingly funny and darkly absurdist Breaking Bad, Bryan Cranston, the wacky dad in Malcolm in the Middle, is Walter White, a chemistry teacher with cancer who turns to meth production in order to provide for his family after his approaching death, racing the clock against his own inner rot. He’s an Arthur Miller Everyman transplanted into a sunstruck no-man’s-land in a show that whips along with the laconic fury of Alex Cox’s Repo Man. Much as Showtime’s departed Huff (Hank Azaria in the title role) distributed a giant helping of malaise unequally among the characters, everybody on Weeds (Mary-Louise Parker as the widowed mom turned pot entrepreneur) is some mongrel breed of sick puppy in a macabre comedy that the late Terry Southern might have giggled up from inside the coffin. The leering title of Showtime’s Californication may promise humpy frolics with an extra order of wry (David Duchovny, making with the drollery), but its mobile hedonism is as corroded with self-loathing and emotional vacuity as the soul-less couplings in the early parts of Michael Tolkin’s The Rapture. It’s a postcard from paradise bearing greetings from the depraved. (Tolkin and fellow novelist-screenwriter-director Bruce Wagner are the chief tone setters when it comes to unsparing biopsies of contemporary Los Angeles, their influence seeping through the pores of Weeds, Californication, and Nip/Tuck, which was originally set in Miami but shot in L.A.) To me, no image of American Armageddon of recent years surpasses the specter and spectacle of fires burning along the horizon in the season-three finale of Weeds, rolling in like an indictment—it’s what we have coming to us, and what we deserve. The Bush legacy writ in smoke.

Women past the plausible age of girlfriend-superheroine-assassin bare-midriff status have been farmed out of appreciable roles in the movies, with notable exceptions made for Susan Sarandon, Meryl Streep, Diane Keaton, Laura Linney, Julianne Moore (her incest scene in Savage Grace was the worst idea since Jill Clayburgh’s in Luna), Charlize Theron (barely in the ads for Hancock), and, hanging on by the arch of her eyebrows, Diane Lane. Television is hardly innocent of tilting youthward with a vengeance, but the plethora of channels and the home nesting of the baby-boomers have cleared foreground room for actresses who’ve acquired womanly hips, husky voices, skeptical looks, and enough history of heartache to furnish a Tammy Wynette revival: Holly Hunter, casting out her inner demons on Saving Grace; Kyra Sedgwick, twanging her vowels as the steel-magnolia ace interrogator on The Closer; Mary-Louise Parker, working that plastic straw like a jazz clarinet on Weeds; Mariska Hargitay, scowling down yet another sex perv with a baroque backstory on Law & Order: SVU; Sally Field, the former Gidget, Flying Nun, and Sybil showing no loss of carbonation as the Minnie Mouse matriarch on Brothers & Sisters; Glenn Close, honing her Medusa fury in Fatal Attraction to an elegant shiv for the corporate-suite skulduggery of Damages; Jessica Walter, forever inscribed in film mythos as Clint Eastwood’s hell-hath-no-fury stalker in Play Misty for Me, enjoying a career renaissance with roles on Arrested Development, Saving Grace, and Law & Order: Criminal Intent, and “a ’70s movie-star-turned-alcoholic granny,” to quote TV Guide, in the CW’s update of 90210; and the impeccable Dana Delany, adding lustrous finesse to the sexual pole-vaulting on Desperate Housewives.

Other actresses have stooped to conquer. As noted earlier, Susan Sarandon suffers no shortage of movie work, but nothing she’s done on the big screen lately afforded the intimate scope of her performance as Doris Duke in HBO’s Bernard and Doris (Ralph Fiennes as Bernard), for which she was justly nominated for an Emmy. And while the peerless Helen Mirren deserved her Academy Award for best actress in The Queen (only Mirren could endow dowdiness with steel wool), her defining and most enduring role will be as Jane Tennison in the Prime Suspect series, where the camera was privy to every flicker and splinter of irritation, thought, and regret with no break in stride or urgency. And although I haven’t screened it yet, Shirley MacLaine is starring in a Lifetime cable biopic about Coco Chanel this September that has to be scary-good. The publicity stills alone of an imperious MacLaine in hat, pearls, and gorgon stare were enough to knock birds out of the sky.

I don’t want to paint roses on the ceiling and pretend that the creativity boom in television may not produce its own blowback. Imaginative breakthroughs can germinate a new inwardness if ego isn’t kept in check. It was a worrying sign for American movies when auteurism roosted in some directors’ heads and they started emulating Fellini and Bergman at their most sovereign and insular, making the artists’ creative turmoil the center ring of a circus allegory or a chamber drama, a secondhand masquerade piled deep in symbolism, cinematic allusions, ominous gamesmanship, and mystification. “Allegorical poetic films never do work,” Pauline Kael lamented in her review of Robert Altman’s Quintet, where an ice-bound group—including Bibi Andersson, taking a break as a member of Ingmar Bergman’s repertory company to lend a distinguished note of fine-boned futility—played a form of Arctic roulette in which the loser’s corpse is flung out to the tundra to be ravaged by bands of Rottweilers. (“Eh, tough crowd,” as Rodney Dangerfield used to say.)

I fear that television at the top-quality end may be moping into a gaudy glacial phase. This time it isn’t the directors who are sprouting magic mushrooms in their heads but series creators, screenwriters who aspire to the popular acclaim and papal authority of David Chase, the brain behind The Sopranos. And who can blame them? Writers skim so little show-business glory that it’s understandable they’d want to spread their firebird wings and dive deep within, given the opportunity. But beware the “self-deceiving chic snobgod of genius,” to quote the late critic Seymour Krim. When David Milch followed up the frontier Aeschylus of Deadwood with a new series for HBO that promised to ride the wild surf into the realm of magic realism, the result was a cult show without a cult called John from Cincinnati, a mélange of toneless non sequiturs, coy evasions, cryptic repetitions, tattooed goons with empty coconut heads, feats of levitation and psychic healing, family discord conducted at full screech (turning Rebecca De Mornay into a shrew—now there’s a negative accomplishment)—a post-millennial Last Year at Marienbad with sand fleas.

Where John from Cincinnati failed (canceled after the first season), AMC’s Mad Men has succeeded, and how. It’s a critic’s darling groomed for greatness despite long inert spells in each episode that leave everything opaque, as if recognizable human behavior would be vulgar coming from such immaculate mannequins. It has a seductive look, a compelling mood, a cast that could have been carved from a giant bar of Ivory soap, but zero grasp of the elastic optimism and vigor of the Kennedy years, the let-go spring of release after the constriction of the Eisenhower 50s. Even the exuberant pop music on the soundtrack is used as a counterpoint to the characters’ enclosed meanness and malaise. The more explaining and self-examination that series creator (and former executive producer of The Sopranos) Matthew Weiner does in interviews and post-episode commentaries, the muddier everything gets. Is he aware that Sterling Cooper is the most incompetent, uninspired ad agency ever to blight Madison Avenue? Meeting after meeting adjourned until the next meeting because Draper’s dimwit team can’t rub two sticks together to spark a decent idea. I don’t mind Mad Men as a mild narcotic, but the raves it’s received smack of self-congratulation, as if its fans in the press and online were fondling their own taste buds. It’s fetishistic praise, better left to the movie critics and their blurb libidos. Please, television, don’t be lured into the exquisite trap of being fooled by your own mystique. Because that’s when the dirty fun dies.